New Media Intelligence Platform from Aggregate Knowledge Comes with Guarantee

Last week, Aggregate Knowledge (AK) launched its next-generation Media Intelligence Platform (MIP), which the company touts as capable of “bringing an exact science to the art of media buying.”

“Today’s data management platforms and traditional business intelligence tools are not enough for brands to maximize their dollars and pinpoint where to reach new customers,” said David Jakubowski, AK’s chief executive officer, in a Dec. 3 press release. “Marketers need access to real-time, actionable intelligence to accurately and effectively allocate media dollars, increase reach and drive more sales.”

“The Media Intelligence Platform is really a natural extension to a DMP,” added Rob Gatto (pictured), president of the San Mateo, Calif.-based AK, in a Dec. 11 interview. “We think that it has three particular components. The first [is] classic data management; these are the pipes that are in place to collect the data, move it around and prepare it. The second piece is predictive analytics; this is taking that data and providing actual insights out of it, and doing it in real time. And then the third pillar of Media Intelligence Platform is attribution. We like to think as multi-touch attribution as the scorecard; it’s the way you keep score of your media, maybe lifetime value of the client, how you think about your sales funnel. What multi-touch attribution does in the end is provide the scorecard that your predictive analytics piece uses to drive more efficiency in your media buy.”

Gatto acknowledged that the industry landscape is heavily populated with companies promising the “ultimate” solution for leveraging data. What sets AK’s MIP apart?

“We use event stream processing. Basically what that means is, we’re not using log files to roll up all this data, and there are a couple of huge advantages to that. First, you do get answers in real time. Second is scalability. We have plenty of clients who’ve attempted to go down the road of a media intelligence platform, only to find that when rolling up logs, the delay between the time the log is rolled up and the answer is available, it’s just too large a lag. So the first point of differentiation is clearly the two data points [media and audience] in a single platform, in real time.”

The second point of differentiation, he said, “would be cross-channel. We cover not only display, but search, social, mobile, video. Especially in the social area, we’re one of three companies that have the ability to do view-through attribution on top of Facebook. We think that’s a huge area of differentiation for us.

“The third would be the integration of multi-touch attribution into the mix,” Gatto continued. “Most of the companies in this space either focus on data or predictive analytics, or maybe some have both. But very few also add in attribution. There are separate attribution companies that exist, but we think having all three together is really what drives the sort of actual insights the client is looking for.

“And then the last piece of differentiation for us is neutrality. We are not in the business of buying or selling data; we’re not in the business of buying or selling media. And that puts in a unique position to really drive insights across all of the media that a client happens to be running. We’re able to tag and we’re able to produce intelligence in areas that most people who arbitrage either on the data or the media side will never be able to do – a Yahoo! home page, for example. So those four things are really what differentiate us in the market.”

Another element that separates Aggregate Knowledge from its competitors is The AK Guarantee, which it offers exclusively to Fortune 500 companies and advertising agencies.

“We’ve built into the solution a lot more functionality around driving exclusive reach and better spending your media budgets, around efficiency and growing sales,” said Leslie Petry, the company’s director of product marketing. “So as part of that, we’ve launched what we call the AK Guarantee. It’s a guarantee of 10-percent increase of your sales metric or your reach within 60 days of using our MIP. As far as I know, we are the only ones in the media intelligence space offering this type of guarantee, the reason being that we have plenty of customers from five different verticals – from CPG to finance, retail, communications and automotive – that have seen double-digit growth very quickly using the Media Intelligence Platform. So we feel very comfortable that within those 60 days, we can help the customer understand how they’re currently spending their media budget, and look at ways to increase efficiencies by at least 10 percent.”

Mike Daly is an award-winning writer and editor with 30 years of experience in publishing. He began his career in 1983 at The News of Paterson, N.J., a long-since defunct daily paper, where at age 22 he was promoted to the position of Editorial Page Editor. Since then he has served in managerial capacities with several news organizations, including Arts Weekly Inc. and North Jersey Media Group in New Jersey and Examiner Media in New York. His work has been honored on numerous occasions by the New Jersey Press Association and the Society for Professional Journalists.